A couple of years ago, our TV set developed a sort of shadow on the right side of the screen; the picture in that area seemed a bit darker than on the left. At first it wasn’t really striking, but over time it slowly got more noticeable, especially to visitors (because Grace and I got used to it). Then last summer, Chekhov bought a new set for Yellowbird’s house which immediately developed some kind of screen problem; since it was under warranty the company sent out a technician to fix it. But after he was done, the technician felt the problem wasn’t fully solved, so he had the company send them a new TV and Chekhov gave us the repaired one. Ever cautious when it comes to such things, I put our old one in the hall because I was pretty sure the technician knew whereof he spoke. He and I were right; the new TV displayed a series of transitory glitches all summer and autumn, none of them all that annoying or persistent. Finally, in late November, it suddenly went black and we knew it was well and truly dead.
So I put the shadowy one back into service, and used an Amazon gift card from one of my gentlemen to halve the cost of a new one. The website said it would arrive the first week of February, and that suited us fine; the old one was (and is) still serviceable, so I was in no rush. But it arrived early, on Christmas Eve, and sat in the living room until Chekhov and I had free time to install it (getting them on & off the wall mount is a two-person job) on New Year’s Day. We installed it and tested it and everything looked good, so I turned it off for a couple of hours until Grace and I were ready for our shows. Lo and behold, it now absolutely refused to respond to the DVD player remote, despite functioning perfectly only two hours before. I tried all the usual tricks (turning everything off, unplugging and replugging, etc), but nothing availed; it was pretty clear to me that while the screen was off, the machine had been busy installing dozens of “updates” (I had already seen it doing so while we were setting up the system). So I set the old TV up on some chairs and switched the cables to watch our shows, and the next day spent over an hour on the phone with customer service before they finally admitted what I had already surmised: one of the “updates” had downgraded the system so it was no longer compatible with “old” (2018) DVD players, and there was no way to revert the system to un-downgrade it. The technician of course tried to talk me into “streaming hundreds of new shows” instead of watching what I actually wanted to watch; I’m sure you can guess how that went. So the defective unit is now on its way back to Amazon, and once the credit is applied to my account I’ll be buying a refurbished Samsung TV that their customer service assures me will work with my all-region Samsung DVD player. We’ll see; in the meantime our old reliable is back in place, shadow and all. And worse come to worst, I’m sure I can buy a used set that is compatible from some pawnshop.
